


Children of the Revolution

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 16:10:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15440760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: Matt escapes from the Galra, lives through the Northern lights, and dreams of science fiction.





	Children of the Revolution

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from T-Rex's _Children of the Revolution_. 
> 
> This zine was a blast to be in - go check out the other participants' work using the tag!

When Matt was younger, he used to read to Pidge, late at night, their blankets a tarp. Through the haze of light that broke through the bedsheets, he could see the gleam of her eyes, an occasional freckle. His own bones, turned inside out and set anew. His smile, all teeth, in the fresh setting of her face. He trawled his way over and over through  _ Alice in Wonderland _ , the weight of his tablet in his hand a familiar extension of his own body. Something to recalibrate to. It was Pidge’s favourite, for all it set Matt’s imagination at an uneven churn. Perhaps it was foreshadowing. Alice fell through the seams, after all - between everything she had ever known, into the shadow of things ever ready to eat her alive. 

Sometimes, Matt thinks of that - of a little girl in a Victorian pinafore, spiralling through the air, skirt outspread like a spinning wheel. Just waiting for the ending. Waiting to land on a needle, or in her own tears, or something unrecognisable. 

('Well!' thought Alice to herself, ‘after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home!’) 

“Matt,” Elpis says. Her voice is gravel. Her high, fluting fingers reach towards his arm, but don’t touch. “Matt, we must go.” 

“I know,” Matt replies, and works on the new habit of tearing himself away. The glowing letters stay inked on the inside of his eyelids, even after they escape the planet’s atmosphere. 

In some ways, standing at his own grave is more anti-climactic than it had any right to be. In some ways, he is still falling. 

 

*

 

It turns out science fiction isn’t as much fun when you’re stuck living it. Matt reels back when he hears the sound of explosions. He can’t help it. Involuntary reaction to external stimuli. His nerves are trigger points. He flinches for a second time when he looks up to see the blank gaze of a sentry guard locked onto him like a bizarre kind of homing beacon. They’re rounding up all their pet scientists again, herding them back to the cells, which is how Matt knows this attack has made it further into the base than any before it. This is something more than precautionary. 

In his mind Matt is stood in the Garrison again, eyes on the door, watching the world through glass.  _ In the event of an attack, do not engage. I repeat, cadets are not to engage with the perpetrator.  _

_ This is not a drill.  _

 

*

 

Some facts: 

Darwinian theory is often misconstrued. Strongest is seen as a synonym for the physical. What Darwin meant was this. It those who adapt - able to shift to their surroundings, able to flex themselves to fit a brave new world without breaking their own bones - who survive. 

The human body is capable of much more than we are aware. We are using perhaps a mere percentage of our capacity. In the presence of great mental or emotional stressors, humans have lifted twenty times their own body weight. Science calls it hysterical strength. 

Matt turns, raises his hand. Watches it as though he’s watching a test subject, from the far side of a laboratory. Wraps his fingers around the back of the sentry’s head, sure as a caress. Brings the whole thing down against the console panel and smashes its face in. 

A final fact: the act of repeatedly using deadly force during the commission of a murder, continuing long after a killing blow has been applied, is known as overkill. Psychology suggests this means the motivation of the act is personal. Nothing is more intimate than hatred. But perhaps it’s both less and more than that. Perhaps they just wanted to make sure - to be certain that this part was really over. 

Sometimes, when Matt dreams, he’s still caught in that first moment, that turning: trapped just before the momentum. The stillness, a perfect drop of it, suspended before the chaos to follow. Sometimes, when Matt dreams, he opens his eyes to steel walls and humming under his feet, and for a second, it’s like he’s back onboard a Galra ship. Sometimes, he sees Takashi and wakes to the phantom taste of blood in his mouth, the hot sting of it in his eyes. 

And sometimes - sometimes he sees the house with yellow walls in Verona, coming into sight as he rounds the last corner, Pidge’s small, sticky-hot hand glued in his. 

('Come, there's no use in crying like that!' said Alice to herself, rather sharply.)

If you give into it, you’ll only drown in a sea of your own making. When Matt closes his eyes, he tries not to dream at all. 

 

*

 

Desperation renders miracles. It’s an easy kind of sentiment, but it works a little better - rings a little truer - if it goes something like this: 

Miracles are bought by sacrifices. That’s why they’re so rare. Everyone wants to be a hero, but nobody wants to pay the cost. They call what happened when they liberated Matt’s last prison a miracle. And maybe it is. Maybe it’s not Matt’s place to call it one way or another. After all, the universe sure feels like it needs one. Maybe there is something cosmic in the coincidences, all the tiny myriad reasons that made Matt give up on giving up, that made the rebels break through the inner ring of the Galra, all of it coming together. A whole greater than the sum of its fear-stricken parts. And Galileo looked to the stars to find the face of something greater than himself, believing it to be better. But Matt can’t help catching himself thinking of the first rule of scientific investigation: correlation doesn’t mean cause.  

Matt’s god is hope. It seems the same sort of thing. It seems close enough to call it something lost in translation. 

When they ask him what he remembers about his captivity, he swallows down the sour rise of terror. He keeps the bad memories held aloft, at a distance. He remembers instead a small girl, holding his hand, sticky with the ghost of candy in the streets of Italy. He keeps the back of her shirt - the little, cotton square of it, the stubborn set of shoulders, the family resemblance - pinned there, just there, right there, in the moment before she ducked into the house and out of sight.He doesn’t think time travel exists, but this is the solution he has. 

“I remember everything,” Matt says. “Or - or close enough. What do you need?” 

 

*

 

Another fact: human beings are born with only two innate fears. One is the fear of falling. The other is the fear of loud noises.

This, of course, means that every other fear is learned. 

 

*

 

The nights here are long. On this planet - artificial like an expensive private island back on Earth, built in the shadow of a moon cluster for secrecy - there is only half an hour of natural sunlight each day. 

“It’s like Finland,” Matt says, “I went there on a research trip once,” and falls silent when all eyes turn to him. The nearest officer blinks twelve eyelids, slow as glazed honey, confused. There’s a silence. 

“Finland?” one asks. “What is a Finland?”

“Never mind,” Matt tells them, “It’s not relevant,” and goes back into the locked room in his head. Takes a mouthful of whatever drink they’ve put in front of him to be polite - ever since they learnt humans could die of dehydration, they’ve been assiduously watering him to the point of drowning. He continues explaining the torture techniques used onboard the second and third prison ship, and how they correlate to each other. 

“There’s a degree of standardisation,” he hears himself saying distantly. When he blinks, he sees the Northern lights, soaring behind his eyelids, remembers his father grabbing his arm, awe-struck. 

“Well,” Sam had murmured, low-voiced, breath puffing in an icy cloud, quiet as though afraid to disturb the very equilibrium of the universe. “Would you just look at that, Matt.”

Once Matt is dismissed for the day, he loiters in the corridors, meandering for the sake of walking with no pre-approved destination. Stretching his legs. After a long time in shackles, he needs to be working on that, on taking his body back out of their hands.

He’s not exactly sure what he’s supposed to be doing. Here. On this false little planet. Not in the greater scheme of things. Maybe false is the wrong word? But it is. It’s not real. It doesn’t feel real, any of it still, even though in the assessment of all his senses it can only be true. But he’s been stuck, hooked on escape as an endpoint for so long, that now the gate is open he’s not sure where to walk. If he’s being herded, even here, just in a kinder way. Any of it. 

(‘"Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else"--but, oh dear!' cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, `I do wish they  _ would _ put their heads down! I am so  _ very _ tired of being all alone here!')

 

*

 

Matt is first introduced to Nyma when he bleeds all over her ship. He’s pulled in through a hatch, after a skirmish on a border of a liberated moon opens up a hole in his side. He remembers she ran cold, her grip on his arms as she hauled him up almost clammy. Like a landlocked mermaid. He doesn’t remember a lot else. In his memory of it, her face is blurred by sweat, and tipped upside down - like he’s underwater, gasping for breath, and she’s down there to watch him. 

“Don’t die,” she tells him. 

“I’ll see what I can do,” he grits out. “Ma’am,” he adds, to be polite. 

When he wakes up, she’s gone. He turns in the medbay, thrashing out of the cocoon of sheets. He leans over the railing of his cot and is promptly sick. His shoulders go forward, hunching, turning him into something ever smaller. 

('What a curious feeling!' said Alice; 'I must be shutting up like a telescope.')

He didn’t die. Death is the opposite state to being alive. So, he must be alive. So, this is what being alive means now. His skull throbs. In the back of his head, he still remembers the sheen of Nyma’s eyes, like looking through old celluloid film in sunlight. He wonders if he’ll see her again. 

 

*

 

A month later, a hologram of the Paladins of Voltron circulates the dark-lit canteen, passed from hand to hand, cupped in the palm like some kind of glowing heart. By this point, they’ve all heard of the return of Voltron. There’s a three-dimensional map of the universe, rigged up in the meeting quarters, charting their path across the Empire, the great curve they’ve cutting through strongholds that were meant to last forever. But they’re a minor outpost, and Voltron have only started to be documented in holotech since one of the more recent victories. In order to confirm a miracle, you have to present concrete proof, after all.  

Matt is on the surviving side of a graveyard shift, sleeplessly manning controls, tweaking the rusting guts of it to patch through signals from the other side of space. Not the best phrasing - space is still, as far as Matt’s aware, infinite. That’s part of the problem. 

His offered intelligence on current Galra practice exhausted, he’s taken on the role - that of a glorified switchboard operator - out of - 

He’s not sure what, only that he couldn’t keep feeling so helpless. There had been an inescapable sense for him that if he stayed as he was - standing still, standing singular - then all the thoughts that dogged the corners of his sleep, lurking and peeling up the corners, might leak out. They’d hound him through the waking world too if he let them, constant and gnawing. So he couldn’t. He mustn’t. And he did what he had done, over and over, at the Garrison: he had found a superior officer and asked for orders. For the next assignment. For the reassurance of being told what to do next, and when. 

In many ways, up until that final moment, Matt had been made to be a model prisoner. It’s a bleak thought, and not one he allows. When the holograph is passed to him, glimmering like a beacon in Elpis’ hands, he takes it, murmurs a thank you in her language. Elpis smiles, pleased, even though he’s sure he botched the grammar. Mostly they all speak in Galran - so many languages have died, their tongues trampled out - or rely on translation devices. But empires live in language, in the synonyms you reach for. Matt is trying to be better than the words his captors put into his mouth.

Matt, still smiling at her, looks down at the hologram. And he nearly drops it. No, he does drop it - someone else makes a soft gasp and snatches it out of the air before it can hit the bay floor, all three of their arms reaching at once. Matt stands. He can feel the tremble, starting in his eyes, reaching right up into his teeth. He grabs it again, and stares long and hard, to make sure - ever doubting, even though he doesn’t need to. 

 

*

 

“Is it true?” Nyma asks. When Matt looks up from the console, wrapped up in its wires and smeared with its juices, she’s there: one devastating arched eyebrow. The same eyes. Matt feels dizzy, but he’s lying on the ground. The feeling defies physics. 

“Probably.” He tries for flippant. He doesn’t ask where she’s been. He doesn’t say  _ you remembered me? _ That’d be too pathetic. “It depends what exactly.”

She rolls her eyes. Celluloid film, Matt decides, pleased to confirm it. When the light hits them. Or the colour of Coca-Cola, back when they still used to sell it in the glass bottles. 

“They’re saying in the canteen bay that the Green Paladin is your family.” 

“Yes,” Matt manages. The word is forced out. 

“Blood family or chosen family?”

“Both,” Matt says. “Why do you ask?”

“We met. Once,” she adds, when Matt sits up so fast, straining towards her. He nearly rips a bundle of wires out of their moorings. He feels cut adrift, even as he’s tangled. “Barely. She seemed fond of Beezer.”

“Sounds about right.” Each word is something to negotiate against the strange way his throat is constricted. 

“I wanted to make sure you were sure,” Nyma says. “Because, from what I’ve heard, the Green Paladin is looking everywhere for a missing brother.” 

('Wake up, Alice dear!' said her sister; 'Why, what a long sleep you've had!')

 

*

 

When Pidge was first learning to ride a bike, hair fanning out madly around her face as her legs worked her into a fury, there had a been a moment where she had wobbled, wavering. Matt had suddenly cursed himself for letting her on the bike in the first place. It was his, too large for her, too much - a two-dimensional thing ill-fitting for a world lived in three. She couldn’t make it. She wouldn’t make it and - 

When he rushed forward, she had scowled and shouted at him to get back. 

“No,” she’d said, “Don’t come to me. Let me come to you.” 

 

*

 

When he looks up at Nyma now, it’s blurry, like it used to be without his glasses. He wipes his face. He recalibrates. 

“Are you going to keep doing that?” She gestures at the tears, the evidence of them dripping down to his chin. 

“I’ll figure something out.”

The feeling in his chest - it’s like coming back online. There it is! There he is! Right there, in that sense of certainty. Of meaning in the universe.  _ Let me come to you.  _ Matt finds he’s smiling. 

(For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.)

 


End file.
